Deadly Desires, Dubious Pleasures – Grievability, Status, and the Subjection of Female Autonomy in Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess (1719)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Following recent feminist scholarship on Haywood and specifically Love in Excess (1719), this article re-reads Haywood’s first novel intersectionally, combining the established focus on female desire with questions of social status, financial independence, and what Judith Butler has called grievability (2009; 2015). Thus diversifying the notion of “women” in the text, and taking up Kathryn R. King’s suggestion that some of Haywood’s representations are “undeniably misogynistic” (2012), I inquire into the politics of rewarding and punishing female desire and how the novel registers the suffering and loss of women with specific positionalities. Indeed, it is a significant though overlooked aspect that the women who are particularly socially and financially independent – and pursue beau Count D’Elmont with greatest force and cleverness, i.e. Alovysa, Melantha, Ciamara, and Violetta – are far from rewarded: they are killed (Alovysa), married off pregnant to save their reputation (disappearance from the novel and metaphorical death; Melantha), commit suicide (Ciamara), and die of an unspecified illness (Violetta). Reading the novel for its treatment of femininities deemed “too audacious” and “too excessive,” and inquiring into the underlying dynamics of gendered power, I explore the extent to which Haywood renders the subjection of female autonomy not only acceptable, but gratifying.